This invention relates to voice messaging techniques used in telephone systems.
Voice messaging telephone systems have grown in popularity over the years and are widely available for use by the public. For example, a visitor at a hotel now has the ability to receive an actual voice message from a calling party through the hotel's telephone system rather than through a hand written message slip from a member of the hotel staff. Another example is in the area of incoming call management systems, where a customer's telephone call is answered by a voice messaging system and the customer is guided by a series of announcements, i.e., voice prompts, to either place an order, receive an account balance, etc.
As described above, in a voice messaging telephone system, an announcement is played back to a user and either provides the user with information or prompts the user for action. For example, the user, in following a sequence of announcement instructions, may enter information that is representative of a time and a date in order to set the time and date for the delivery of an earlier-recorded voice mail message. In providing these announcements to a user, the design and use of a voice messaging system is simplified if only one language is supported. For example, the sentence structure required for any announcement is known a priori thereby making the construction of each announcement simpler. However, even if only one language is supported, there is still a problem of entering information that is user-dependent into a voice messaging system. For example, even though the English language is spoken in both the United States and England, the structure of information representing a date is different. In the United States a date is represented in a "month/day" format, while in England a date may be represented in a "day/month" format. This problem is further compounded if additional languages, or market segments, are required to be supported by the voice messaging system. For example, a voice messaging system for use by the government may require the use of a twenty-four hour clock instead of twelve hour clock with A.M. and P.M. designations.
As a result of language, culture, or market, specific variations in representing information, the design of the data entry portion of any voice messaging system typically results in an implementation that is user specific. Continuing with the above date example, either a custom computer program is written to accept data entry for each culture that is supported, or the user of a voice messaging system must conform to another culture's habits like a person in England being required to enter date information in the date format that is used within the United States. Consequently, a voice messaging system for use within the United States cannot be directly sold in England without further culture-specific design modifications to the existing voice messaging system, modifications that take time and incur additional expenses, and which thereby limit the multinational capability of existing voice messaging systems in an increasingly international marketplace. Further, if no change is made to the voice messaging system, the inconvenience, and insensitivity, of requiring a user in another country to conform their habits to those of users in the United States may be unacceptable.